History

According to historical tradition, at least some of the Germanic tribes migrated to the mouth of the Vistula from Scandinavia. Little is known of Gepidic, Rugian, and Burgundian; some knowledge of Vandalic, Visigothic, and, especially, Ostrogothic is provided by the names recorded in Greek and Latin writings. The only East Germanic language on which there is extensive information is the Gothic—more specifically, Visigothic—that was spoken along the western shore of the Black Sea about the middle of the 4th century ce.

Knowledge of Gothic is derived primarily from the remains of a Bible translation made for the Visigoths living along the lower Danube by Ulfilas, a Visigothic bishop of the Arian church, who lived during the 4th century. The surviving manuscripts of this translation, which are not originals but later copies thought to have been written in northern Italy during the period of Ostrogothic rule (493–554), include considerable portions of the New Testament. The best-known manuscript is the Codex Argenteus, written in silver and gold letters on purple parchment and containing (in 188 leaves remaining from an original 330 or 336) portions of the four Gospels. Closely related to these biblical manuscripts are eight leaves containing fragments of a commentary (called the Skeireins in Gothic) on the Gospel According to John. Minor nonbiblical texts include a fragment of a calendar, two deeds containing some Gothic sentences, and a 10th-century Salzburg manuscript that gives the Gothic alphabet, a few Gothic words with Latin transliteration, and some phonetic remarks with illustrative examples.

In the 4th and 5th centuries Gothic (Visigothic and Ostrogothic) must have spread to some degree, along with the conquering Goths, throughout much of southern Europe; but there is no evidence for its survival in Italy after the fall of the Ostrogothic kingdom, and in Spain it is doubtful that the Visigoths retained their language until the Arab conquest. In the 9th century the German monk Walafrid Strabo mentions that Gothic was still being used in some churches near the lower Danube. After that time Gothic seems to have survived only among the Goths of the Crimean Peninsula, who were last mentioned in the middle of the 16th century by a Flemish diplomat named Augier Ghislain de Busbecq, who, while on a mission to Constantinople in 1560–62, collected a number of words and phrases showing that their language was still essentially a form of Gothic.

Characteristics

The Gothic alphabet, said to have been created by Ulfilas, contained 27 symbols, two of which functioned only as numbers, while the remaining 25 were used as both numbers and letters. The shape, numerical value, and ordering of the symbols show clearly that the alphabet was based primarily on that of Greek, though a few symbols seem to have been adapted from the Latin alphabet.

The Gothic consonant system seems to have been largely identical with that assumed above for Proto-Germanic: p, t, k, kw (this last sound was probably much like the qu in queen); f, þ, h, hw (this last sound was probably pronounced much like the wh in white); b, d, g; s, z; m, n; l, r; w, j. The nasal n was presumably velar before the velar consonants k, q, and g; in these positions it was usually written (as in Greek) as g or gg. Examples of this spelling include dragk ‘drank,’ igqis ‘you two,’ and briggan ‘bring,’ although n was occasionally used as in Latin (e.g., þank ‘thanks,’ inqis ‘you two,’ and bringiþ ‘bring ye’).

The Gothic alphabet contained the five simple vowel symbols, i, e, a, o, and u, from which four compound symbols, ei, ai, au, and iu, also were made; in addition, w was used to transliterate Greek υ and οι (both of which were pronounced as umlauted u /ü/ in 4th-century Greek). The generally accepted development of the Proto-Germanic vowels in Gothic can be diagrammed as follows:

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Brackets in the Proto-Germanic line indicate that the two linked sounds coalesced into one; brackets in the Gothic line indicate two variants of the same sound that are in different phonetic environments. Proto-Germanic *i and *e apparently first merged as a single vowel and then became Gothic i in most positions but became ai before h, hw, and r. Similarly, Proto-Germanic *u∼o became Gothic u in most positions, but au before h, hw, and r.

Archaic features

Gothic shows a number of archaic features that had been almost or entirely lost by the time the other Germanic languages began to appear in writing; among these are a passive voice and one type of past tense formed with reduplication, a dual number in the first and second persons of its verbs and pronouns, and a special vocative case in one noun class. At the same time, Gothic also shows changes from Proto-Germanic, among which are the shortening of most long vowels in final unstressed syllables and the loss of most short vowels (e.g., Proto-Germanic *erþō ‘earth’ became Gothic airþa, Proto-Germanic *stainaz ‘stone’ became Gothic stains). Finally, voiced fricatives that occurred or came to occur at the end of a word are unvoiced (e.g., nominative *hlaiaz, accusative *hlaian ‘bread, loaf’ changed to hlaifs and hlaif, respectively [but dative hlaiba]).